Friday, March 30, 2012

Bye-bye, Ms. Lauren I

So long, Hayes, Garnier, Smith, and Vaughan.

After a lot of sturm and drang; misplaced outrage; and claims of not knowing what they were doing (which is partly correct…at least for some members) Trenton’s city council last week adopted a budget for FY2012 that reduced the salary line for the staff of the mayor’s office.This line item reduction means that the mayor has to find a way to spread the remaining money around to pay his aides, secretary etc or let some of them go effective today. This would include the Mayor’s Director of Policy and Communication, Lauren Ira.

As much as we would like to comment on this situation, it is not our policy to discuss personnel matters publicly.

Being loyal to friends is nice trait. However, you are overlooking that Ms. Ira was paid, and well, to do a job. She was to shape the communications coming from the Mack administration.

The quality of writing that was exhibited over Ms. Ira's tenure with the city was nothing short of horrible. If she was responsible for the creation of some of those press releases, she needs to go back to school to learn some basic grammar and sentence construction.

If she was handed something already written and couldn't clean it up to meet the most basic standards of the English language, then she was being overpaid.

The long and the short of it is that Ms. Ira added nothing to the betterment of the city of Trenton in either the policy or the communication areas. Her tenure showed her to be ineffective, if not unqualified.

She, unfortunately, became the face of a failed administration unable to tell competency from cronyism.